Last year, Perfect World Entertainment and Echtra Games announced their plans to continue Runic Games’ Torchlight series with a persistent world game called Torchlight Frontiers. The pair recently unveiled a brand new class for the game, the Railmaster, and it’s quite different than what you have come to expect from the series. You can check the new class out below:
As you can see, the Railmaster wields a giant hammer that he can use to not only attack enemies, but to lay down track and customized platforms for an artillery train that can deal a ton of damage. In the Torchlight universe, Railmasters stem from the first human empire, The Rail Kingdoms. While that empire fell, Railmasters remained and have been passing down their knowledge ever since. A Railmaster named Captain Jacobi even made an appearance in Torchlight II, which is coming to consoles later this year with help from Panic Button.
In a post on Torchlight Frontiers’ website, the developers delved into the creation of the class. After Captain Jacobi’s appearance in Torchlight II, the developers knew they wanted to make the Railmaster a viable class for players to use as well as one that stood out from the Engineer class. The team spent a long time developing how the character looks, with concept artist Jen saying the general goal was to “make a character that had an easygoing but hardworking vibe, someone you’d want to have a beer with after a long day.”
While a design was eventually settled upon after several iterations, getting the tracks to work properly was another challenge. Originally, players would’ve had to connect tracks via a series of nodes on a map, but eventually the idea to have the player dynamically lay track and have the train follow came to fruition. It’s always interesting to see developers give insight into their creation processes, and for such a unique class it’s neat to see how the idea came to fruition.
You can see some art from when the Railmaster class was being developed as well as their first screenshots from this new Torchlight game below. Torchlight Frontiers is poised to launch for PC, PS4, and Xbox One later this year and the Railmaster will be playable in the first Closed Alpha for the game on April 23.
The post Torchlight Frontiers Unveils the Charmingly Odd Railmaster Class by Tomas Franzese appeared first on DualShockers.